Popular Topic - Cultural, Social & Racial Issues

This issue of the Networker is an attempt to explore what we can contribute as a profession to the “conversation about race,” which, as lame and ungainly as the phrase often sounds, keeps heating up around us, even as most of us have done our best to ignore it. The intent is not somehow to analyze racism as yet another clinical problem that we can solve through our good intentions, insight, and therapeutic ingenuity, but to recognize the hard and uncomfortable truth of how racist oppression, explicit or implicit, doesn’t just harm “them.” Ultimately, it harms us all.

Listening to the Untold Stories

Many poor, young, black people see themselves as trapped behind a wall-less prison with no exits. They know all too well that their daily experience—whether it’s going to lousy schools, succumbing to drug use and abuse, or being the victims of crime and lack of employment prospects—doesn’t matter unless it disrupts the lives of the white mainstream.

Some Uncomfortable Reflections on Growing Up White

At a time when many are calling for a renewed national conversation about race, an aging, liberal, white New Yorker—who admits he’s never been a party to any such conversation, not with a black person anyway—shares some highly uncomfortable, extremely personal reflections.

Encompassing the Big & the Small

The promise of the community mental health movement of the 1960s, providing high-quality psychological and social services to poor families, remains unfullled. But today, two professionals bring together both a grasp of broader social issues and a store of practical clinical wisdom to offer complementary perspectives on how to best help poor communities.

Personality and Habit Change: Are You an Upholder, Obliger, Questioner, or Rebel?

In her first book, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin tried to answer the question “How do I become happier?” With her new book on changing the habits of daily life, she answers the question “No, seriously, how do I become happier?”